The Power Struggle Stage

…when you fell in love, your relationship felt like a series of magical moments… each one punctuated by your heart pounding and a nervous excitement that set your spirit soaring and your stomach doing flip-flops just at the thought of seeing him or her? You felt alive and wanted to share every waking moment with your lover, right? Remember those moments of being joined at the hip? Somewhere between 2 months and 2 years into your relationship, the intoxicating feelings of being in love begin to fade and are slowly replaced with a primal panic inside as it dawns on us that we feel trapped or abandoned by the very person we thought would make us happy and look after our heart. This is the beginning of a relationship stage that all relationships face, called the Power Struggle stage. At this point, if you don’t run for the hills and try find a new relationship, you attempt to get your needs met by trying to change your partner to be more like you want them to be (like you) and more like when you first met. Or, you’ll try to punish them for not being who you thought they were. Of course, they do the same to you and before you know it, you begin to feel like you can’t be yourself around your partner anymore. You both walk on eggshells around each other, feeling scared, misunderstood and not knowing what to do to change it. After a while of this power struggle, even the smallest disagreements get blown out of proportion leaving you feeling alone, abandoned and totally disconnected from the one person you love most. Whatever the case, your relationship no longer feels safe. To some degree you lost yourself in your relationship while falling in love and have become dependent on your partner. This is not actually a “bad” thing and is a necessary part of the bonding process that happens when we fall in love. However, it is not a sustainable way to live, so nature forces you to energetically separate and establish a new, more healthy shared power between you. If you succeed, you graduate with flying colors to the next stage of relationship – mature love. If you don’t, you break up. Taken from an article found at http://www.loveatfirstfight.com/relationship-advice/conflict/overcome-power-struggle-stage/

I’ve learned that you cannot make someone love you, all you can do is be someone who can be loved. Ritu Ghatourey